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North Korea has used political prisoners as guinea-pigs for poisonous gas tests as recently as 2002, and South Korea's intelligence agencies were aware of such activities, according to Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the U.S.-based Jewish human rights organization known as the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Cooper made these allegations at a press conference held at the Seoul Press Center recently, the details of which were reported extensively by The International Herald Tribune in its November 24 issue.
At the press conference, Cooper said that he had learned of the experiments through interviews with three North Korean defectors. The regime had placed political prisoners in a glass enclosure and connected them to audio equipment to closely monitor their reactions to poisonous substances, Cooper asserted.
The human rights activist quoted a former chemist and North Korean defector, who had been engaged in chemical experiments, as saying that the North Korean government had used a broad range of chemical gases. Some were capable of delivering instant deaths to their victims while others killed slowly, wiping out large numbers of people.
The South Korean government had a clear picture of the North¡¯s activities and pictorial evidence revealed greater detail than scenes from a BBC news broadcast shown in February, said Cooper.
The International Herald Tribune said that the South Korean Ministry of Unification had been unable to confirm Cooper¡¯s allegations. The South Korean government has been reluctant to raise divisive issues with the North that could jeopardize already-strained relations across the border, reported the newspaper.
According to a report in 2003 released by the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a private human rights organization, there are about 150,000 to 200,000 political prisoners in North Korea¡¯s labor camps, or modern gulags.
Choi Seung-ho (river@chosun.com )
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